Full GPU acceleration coming with Flash Player 10.1
NVIDIA took the big surprise out of tomorrows MAX keynote by adding a pamphlet to the MAX swag bag that everyone received when registering. It says:
Unique technical partnership between NVIDIA and Adobe engineers optimizes full pipeline acceleration of Flash 10.1 on the GPU.
This means two things: Flash Player 11 will not see the light of day tomorrow. Instead, a minor version update 10.1 is going to be releasead. This release will see full graphics pipeline rendering on the GPU. In my mind this means that everything from rendering vectors, text, transforms and Pixel Bender to compositioning will run on the GPU. That’s absolutely fantastic (if true)!
However, having only a minor revision of FP released tomorrow probably means that there won’t be many other new features. But expect to see a number of notifications regarding running FP on mobile devices. Again the NVIDIA pamphlet provided some unexpected news:
Full GPU acceleration of dynamic games and rich internet applications in the palm of your hand
Seems that GPU acceleration (and FP 10.1) is comming to your mobile (if your mobile is NVIDIA TEGRA-powered, err, which it is not…).
Stay tuned and watch the keynotes.
[Update] Shit. GPU acceletation will only be available for mobile devices and selected notebooks. Windows 7 (i.e. DiretX 11 machines) will have h.264 decoded on the GPU, but won’t support full GPU acceleration in the rendering pipeline. Mac’s and Linux boxes have even less support for the GPU. Big bummer. I really think Adobe is missing a big opportunity here. Unity3D or Torque3D will become the defacto web-based game plugin, at least for 3D games.
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Bah .. I was hoping for an increase in performance when playing videos in HD because Adobe’s Firefox plugin is absolutely terrible. So many bug reports, so many performance reports and Adobe still just shrug and ignore the problem. We need a new player for mulimedia content on websites, and as far as I know, the only alternative is Silverlight but it focuses stricly on Windows (ie no quicktime playback etc.) and it lacks in features which makes it unappealing for developers.
One can only hope that Adobe will get their heads out of their rears and start working on the problems associated with their player. Fat chance of that happing though.